Oh Meghan, your people are not ‘your’ people

An open letter of advice

Have you seen it? If you haven’t then do just walk on by. You need to have watched the saccharine, bovine nonsense that is With Love, Meghan to enjoy fully.

Okay, first caveat is that THIS IS NOT MEGHAN’S FAULT. You must, must remember that. She’s surrounded by the madness of LA, acting, TV production and ex Royalty, so the advice she’s taking is dreadful. She’s also really hungry, as is almost every other woman around her, so they’re not making good choices. You can’t be sensible when you’re hungry, you just can’t.

Here are my pointers for future TV productions. (Meghan, I am available as a freelance life coach should you need further help from a divorced mother of 3 from Leicester, DM me hun).

1. Meghan, your trade is acting, not presenting as a personality in your own right. Whoever let you just ad lib to camera should be sacked. Especially if they said ‘we’ll make it work in the edit’. They’re a charlatan. You should have been scripted and there should have been a writer’s room employed to do this, with equal numbers of American and British writers. Definitely including Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

2. Meghan, it is evident from various moments caught on camera that you’re cack-handed. You spill water outside the vase, you can’t shred a chicken breast to save your life and your balloon arch was a mess. Lean into this. Be clumsy. Don’t just not mention the pigs ear in front of you, or worse still make nods to perfection not being the aim whilst utterly buggering things up. You either are a domestic goddess, or you’re not. Us watchers are simple souls, we need to understand which lane you’re in. I think you’re an ideas person, but not an executor. (See flower arranging as evidence). This is fine. Let the writers weave it into the script.

   

3. Meghan, we know you don’t prepare and cook food very often. You gave the game away too many times. The wardrobe choices; no real cook would allow the stylist to put them in white flappy cuffs. The whisking of the frittata eggs with a stick blender to save time? It takes a year 7 Food Tech student less time to hand whisk eggs than it takes to plug a blender in. The casual reference to preparing crudités the day before you plan to serve them… curled up spongey carrots and courgettes? No thanks. The toasted egg sandwich presented to the camera guy; no one toasts small slices of bread to house a fried egg, that’s an explosion waiting to happen! You have to lean into who you are and that is not a chef or even a cook, it’s a household manager (I think).

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   I know you have a lot of trauma from your short spell in The Firm. I know they didn’t accept you. I know they didn’t want you to be yourself. I know that was jarring and felt lonely, especially when you’ve ushered your life along with a smile and a twinkle of the eyes. Harsh truth: us Brits are dicks. We like things the way we like them. We’re superior for no good reason - maybe because we have a lot of old buildings around us, dunno. You could never win. You’re American AND AN ACTOR. You couldn’t have been a worse match. (And that’s without even delving into the racism you encountered). You spent a few years trying to bend into a palatable version of yourself and you just couldn’t. Channel that energy and let rip. If you want people to like you, you really need to be okay with being disliked. I know that sounds like a nonsense, but it’s true. Promise. Authenticity is magnetic.

4. Meghan, it’s okay not to have close friends. We know the people on the first series aren’t great pals, it’s clear from the constant referral to how long you’ve known each friend/ex colleague. It’s fine. It is. Not everyone has close friends, you’re allowed to enjoy being married and having kids and loving your dogs and not pooling energy into friendships with other women who are as hungry as you. Competitive under eating isn’t a basis for a friendship. That shit should have been left behind age 15.

   

5. Meghan, breaking the 4th wall and chatting to the crew like you’re there to serve them doesn’t make you seem ‘of the people’. Ditto stopping filming to make the camera man coffee, ditto the egg sandwich debacle. Nobody cares if the camera guy has an opinion. We’re here for YOU. Whoever thought it might make you seem more pedestrian and approachable is foolish. It’s irritating. I don’t care if Greg/Brad/Cody thinks you’ve made some store bought flowers look amazing, Greg/Brad/Cody knows nothing about the gaping chasm between a florist’s chill room and store bought flowers, literally nothing. In fact, just lose the store bought flowers entirely, unless they’re carnations bought from a Stoke-on-Trent Esso, picked up at midnight from the kiosk with 20 Lambert & Butler lights and a bottle of strawberry Yop. Now making those look pretty would be a feat. Meghan, we care about YOU and your bizarre life. Stop including the plebs. We know loads of them already and they bore us.

6. Meghan, filming in a stunning location that isn’t your home is a mistake. You should have learnt this from the Oprah incident. Just because you admitted it’s not your place is irrelevant. You can’t centre a whole show around entertaining and gifting but host it in a set house. Who allowed this to happen? It should have been shot in your mansion. Meghan, we want to be invited into your home! You keep banging on about what a great hostess you are and yet still we’re on the outside looking in. Where’s this famous hospitality? We want to see the books on your shelves, the linen on your beds and the weird out of date condiments in your fridge. We want sight of the HP Sauce and the Coleman’s Mustard. To be clear, we want evidence of Hazza, sorry ‘H’. Also, know that calling him ‘H’ makes him sound like a relative of Judi Dench’s Bond character ‘M’. Not sexy, not sexy at all.

7. Meghan, you have lovely writing but for the love of God, put the fountain pen down. As a fellow gal with nice hand writing I get that you want to show it off, but I think it would have been more stoic, more appealing especially to the Brits, to just have it as the title and chapter font, then let the PR team leak to the press that this is your very own handwriting. Lingering shots of your copperplate jam jar labels, followed by the hand written chapter headers is over egging the pudding, as we Brits say. Too much. It’s being a bit too pleased with yourself. It’s having tickets on yourself. If you want to push how beautiful your writing is so very much, let those script writers handle it. They know what they’re doing, producers and director’s do not. Producers and directors just aren’t real people. They think nice handwriting is a personality type and it isn’t.

8. Meghan, you do not have to day drink to show how carefree and cer-ray-zeeee you are. You’re very last season with this. It’s not 2001. Someone in production should have pointed out that it’s way wilder to bareback your way through life these days. Stone. Cold. Sober. I have a horrible feeling this may have been Hazza (‘H’)’s influence given he is upper class and British and is co-owner of the production company. “Yah, it’s totally fun for girls to make their own cocktails, get a bit squiffy and then let me and Jonty both weigh her bazookas, ha ha ha, snort”.

   

   

   

   

   

9. Meghan, you need to be aware that us fellow gifting girls and hostesses with the mostess, we’re onto you. We all know the real reason you go the extra mile, why you make special condensed milk super sweet coffee for the friend who likes creamer, why you fashion crostini into ladybirds/bugs with half a tomato, a slice of olive and dots of balsamic glaze to delight the parents at your kids parties, why you pop and spice bespoke popcorn for house guests to snaffle in bed. WE KNOW. And now you’ve given the game away to everyone else and that’s just not cricket. You’ve shown our hand, that we notice other people’s desires, that we attend to their inner whims, that we anticipate their every need so that they know we care, so that they value us, so they want to spend time with us, so that they perhaps listen to us. To fill the well of loneliness within us… to have someone adore us. Jesus Meghan, this wasn’t something you were supposed to expose. You broke the code. Don’t do this again. You can do the nice touching things, but you can’t keep telling people how much you want them to like these things. It’s too much. YOU’RE SUFFOCATING MEGHAN.

   

10. Meghan, enough with the edible flowers. You’re hyper focusing on them. Stop it. Someone State-side, stage an intervention please.

    

    

    

    What about you? Do you have any advice for Meghan?